Self-instruction can enhance intellectual competence. These studies search for conditions under which self-instructions will mediate generalized problem-solving by children and by adults with developmental disabilities (especially with few language skills)> The target skills are various sorting and memory tasks, in both formal teaching and naturalistic formats suggesting probably practical significance. Specifically, we will investigate whether we can (1) find cases in which correct self-instruction occurs but fails to mediate correct problem- solving, and remediate those failures by teaching the skill of self compliance with self-instructions; (2) develop forms of self-compliance suitable and effective for both typically developing young children and adults with developmental disabilities; (3) thereby reduce dependence on teacher prompts; (4) extend the self-instructional and newly developed self-compliance train procedures to participants lacking the verbal skills necessary for spoken self-instruction, by teaching them to create their own visual samples matching to which solves the previously unsolved problem; (5) extend the techniques of self-creating visual samples to become useful self-instructions for problem solving in the everyday lives of these participants; and (6) teach generalized sample self-creation skills suitable to diverse new problems otherwise dependent on (and usually failing because of) short-term memory deficiencies. Our research design is aimed at showing (1) that the self-instructional training contributes only to the skill of self-instruction, not to the problem whose solution is facilitated by that self-instruction; and (2) that the resultant improvement is attributable simply to the new self-instruction skills. We offer a conceptualization of self-instruction as an observable, teachable, and experimentally analyzable set of behavioral skills; we argue that the experimental analysis of these particular skills requires a research design sensitive to a wide range of individual differences, and to the likelihood that newly acquired self-instructional skills will rapidly become covert, which means their function must be clarified very quickly after they are taught.